One of the most difficult and costly areas of health care, education, and rehabilitation involves the need for individuals to modify their behavior to prevent or recover from medical ailments. Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, asthma, chronic pain, depression, addiction, cancer and a wide variety of other ailments have been clinically shown to respond well to lifestyle modification, including changes to diet, exercise patterns, and stress levels. Patients who are recovering from a surgical procedure such as heart bypass surgery or are suffering from diabetes, for example, must often make lifestyle changes in order to survive.
When individuals are successful in making and adhering to positive lifestyle changes, they frequently require fewer physician visits, go to the hospital less often, and have fewer surgeries. Long term medical costs go down accordingly.
At present, many programs for helping patients make lifestyle changes involve a doctor's visit and distribution of a brochure describing the health benefits of behavior modification and lifestyle change. This method is often ineffective in modifying behavior because there is little or nothing in the way of an on-going support mechanism to assist the patient in complying with recommendations, insufficient means for motivating the patient to make recommended changes, and insufficient means for monitoring compliance with such recommendations. Participation in an on-going support program is often effective for patients who have undergone surgery and must make subsequent lifestyle changes, but currently available in-person programs involve costly medical staff and facilities. It can also be inconvenient for the patient to travel to such programs on a regular basis. Because of their cost and the potential for inconvenience, many support programs last for only a limited time, which is often insufficient for the patient to modify behavior thoroughly and effectively.
Another disadvantage of existing lifestyle modification programs is the lack of information readily available to the physician regarding the patient's compliance with the program. With the present push toward low cost yet high quality health care, a system by which a physician could readily access information on patient compliance has clear benefits.
The development of a therapeutic program that could effectively motivate patients to modify their behavior and change their lifestyles to prevent or recover from ailments, and could be delivered to them electronically at home, work, or while traveling, would be highly desirable. It would also be desirable for such a system to enable physicians and their staffs to receive frequent feedback regarding patients' compliance with their programs. It would be further desirable if such a system allowed for aggregate reviews of such information by health plan payors, such as HMOs, insurance companies, and large self-insured employers, for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of managed health care.